LOIE MERRITT
The Edge of the Sea is a Strange and Beautiful Place
The day of her nineteenth birthday, she fell for a pair of hands holding a camera. These hands, such blistering control, such feathered grace, sliding a rough index finger along her jaw and pushing her head hard against the tree, exposing a collarbone. Opening a door.
She’ll do anything to hold on to that moment, or at least anything to not think about what her mother discusses with that psychiatrist after she leaves the room or how many times her mother has read her diary. So, that diary has long since been a story of what she should fantasize about, what she should crave, and what passes for thoughts in Miami Beach. Clark. Humphrey. Gene. And John. Wishing to kiss. Wishing to marry so and so. And so on.
Locked in her room since ten o’clock, the heat is making her skin expand. Like a sponge, her body feels as wide and thick as the mattress she sits on, listening to the late season cicadas.
She loves the way the insect’s name makes her tongue flick the top of her mouth. She says the word as often as she can, letting her teeth tap together sucking in air at the second syllable.
Each week she plays with the words she likes to taste in her mouth, just waiting for him to call her stupid, “I can’t sleep when it’s dark. Sunlight makes me dreamy. My cicadian rhythm must be screwy. Can I have a cigarette?”
“I didn’t know you smoke,” He spoke, uncrossing his legs. “I won’t share this with your mother, just this once.”
The shrink does not correct her misuse of the word, but makes note of it in his thickening file. A line that she recreates in a trim notebook with a red leather cover: I bet he writes, inform mother – patient should be locked in room at night to encourage sleep. Patient exhibits lack of language skills; reading might assist in better sleep cycle. Inform mother of adolescent desire to rebel. She smokes. She drinks. Consider the possibility of masturbation.
She writes her truth inside, however much of it still so strange. Shush cicadas, for one second please! Please stop. This morning you infiltrated my dream. I feasted on your swampy eggs. I pulled your wings off and drowned you in a tide pool filled with that woman’s satin hair.
Every so often, the insectsidious interruption: A buzzing that makes her shiver and the pen trails off the page, marking her bare thigh in a constellation of ink. She also hears raccoons attacking the trashcans, but raccoon doesn’t roll on her tongue.
I try all the time to explain to mother what I feel. How I want to make my own meaning of things. We speak in different languages. Her words are fat and always hungry. She looks at me like I’m a slice of old ham. I’m ready to bite her fingers off, I swear. I’m ready to scatter her across the beach. Watch her float away. I wish I could stop her noise. I wish. Maybe someday I’ll be able to write for real and share my secrets.
The real secret is written in the sand, an imprint of her bare spine.
After the picture was taken.
When she learned: the lining of her thighs is not a war zone, until she wants it to be so. Each one of her toes is a seaweed polyp waiting to be sucked by the woman who took her picture, the one with the satin hair.
She is held hostage, in the grip of wakefulness by this screaming insect, and it makes her want to scream too. It is two in the morning and she is biting at her chapped lips. Eventually, drawing the taste of blood onto her tongue. She sucks in her bottom lip knowing that if she stains the pillowcase, her mother will deny her breakfast, close the door on her hand, only then perhaps slide her a piece of burnt toast with no butter.
By three in the morning, a pile of blank thank you notes has bored a hole into her temple, staring at her from the tidy desk below the window that looks out to the sea. Blank cards stroked with a border of blue moon wisteria, waiting to acknowledge her gifts, ripped open two weeks ago.
At her birthday party, this elegant stranger, a friend of her mother, a woman and an artist, took the photograph that she still has not seen. Will never see.
I wish I could send her this love letter. I wish I could ask mother her name. What did she do when I asked for her name, while she unbuckled the strap of my shoe? She stuck all four fingers into my mouth and scraped my back teeth. I choked on her. She ordered me not to speak.
She recalls draping herself across the palm tree in the front yard, away from everyone. Everyone seemed more interested in her mother, besides. Her mother poured the drinks. Her mother told stories of bedwetting and night terrors, imaginary friends and made up words. From the front yard she could hear the party laughing at the expense of her memories. Her dear mother, always working so hard.
She’ll do anything to hold on to that moment, or at least anything to not think about what her mother discusses with that psychiatrist after she leaves the room or how many times her mother has read her diary. So, that diary has long since been a story of what she should fantasize about, what she should crave, and what passes for thoughts in Miami Beach. Clark. Humphrey. Gene. And John. Wishing to kiss. Wishing to marry so and so. And so on.
Locked in her room since ten o’clock, the heat is making her skin expand. Like a sponge, her body feels as wide and thick as the mattress she sits on, listening to the late season cicadas.
She loves the way the insect’s name makes her tongue flick the top of her mouth. She says the word as often as she can, letting her teeth tap together sucking in air at the second syllable.
Each week she plays with the words she likes to taste in her mouth, just waiting for him to call her stupid, “I can’t sleep when it’s dark. Sunlight makes me dreamy. My cicadian rhythm must be screwy. Can I have a cigarette?”
“I didn’t know you smoke,” He spoke, uncrossing his legs. “I won’t share this with your mother, just this once.”
The shrink does not correct her misuse of the word, but makes note of it in his thickening file. A line that she recreates in a trim notebook with a red leather cover: I bet he writes, inform mother – patient should be locked in room at night to encourage sleep. Patient exhibits lack of language skills; reading might assist in better sleep cycle. Inform mother of adolescent desire to rebel. She smokes. She drinks. Consider the possibility of masturbation.
She writes her truth inside, however much of it still so strange. Shush cicadas, for one second please! Please stop. This morning you infiltrated my dream. I feasted on your swampy eggs. I pulled your wings off and drowned you in a tide pool filled with that woman’s satin hair.
Every so often, the insectsidious interruption: A buzzing that makes her shiver and the pen trails off the page, marking her bare thigh in a constellation of ink. She also hears raccoons attacking the trashcans, but raccoon doesn’t roll on her tongue.
I try all the time to explain to mother what I feel. How I want to make my own meaning of things. We speak in different languages. Her words are fat and always hungry. She looks at me like I’m a slice of old ham. I’m ready to bite her fingers off, I swear. I’m ready to scatter her across the beach. Watch her float away. I wish I could stop her noise. I wish. Maybe someday I’ll be able to write for real and share my secrets.
The real secret is written in the sand, an imprint of her bare spine.
After the picture was taken.
When she learned: the lining of her thighs is not a war zone, until she wants it to be so. Each one of her toes is a seaweed polyp waiting to be sucked by the woman who took her picture, the one with the satin hair.
She is held hostage, in the grip of wakefulness by this screaming insect, and it makes her want to scream too. It is two in the morning and she is biting at her chapped lips. Eventually, drawing the taste of blood onto her tongue. She sucks in her bottom lip knowing that if she stains the pillowcase, her mother will deny her breakfast, close the door on her hand, only then perhaps slide her a piece of burnt toast with no butter.
By three in the morning, a pile of blank thank you notes has bored a hole into her temple, staring at her from the tidy desk below the window that looks out to the sea. Blank cards stroked with a border of blue moon wisteria, waiting to acknowledge her gifts, ripped open two weeks ago.
At her birthday party, this elegant stranger, a friend of her mother, a woman and an artist, took the photograph that she still has not seen. Will never see.
I wish I could send her this love letter. I wish I could ask mother her name. What did she do when I asked for her name, while she unbuckled the strap of my shoe? She stuck all four fingers into my mouth and scraped my back teeth. I choked on her. She ordered me not to speak.
She recalls draping herself across the palm tree in the front yard, away from everyone. Everyone seemed more interested in her mother, besides. Her mother poured the drinks. Her mother told stories of bedwetting and night terrors, imaginary friends and made up words. From the front yard she could hear the party laughing at the expense of her memories. Her dear mother, always working so hard.
She is a reminder.
A skinny thing, with breasts like her mother when she was younger. Bug bites. A trim waist and hips that could suit birth if she wants to be fertile. Her laugh will always be fanatical.
Breasts like her mother, but the silent narcissism, that’s from her father. An army brat with too much bicep. The father who returned from the war and then left.
A reminder. She looks at me and sees him. Does anyone ever see the real anything? I promise to always make it up as I go along. I promise to always need to write down what her fingers tasted like.
And this is why her mother banishes her body at night. This is why her mother entertained a crowd with her body’s brief history on the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday.
This is the body that gets smacked over and over again with a stack of bills, when she falls asleep listening to the radio. Past due. Past. Due. “You lazy bitch. Look what you’ve turned me into.”
Her mother calls her a tax on her life. “A tax on my god damn life,” and last week threw a French horn at her. The French horn, purchased on credit, hit her in the stomach and she fell into the full-length mirror, at the end of the hall. She didn’t mind really, never learned to play more than a few sad notes. But she loved the mirror and the mirror broke.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” her mother said to the shards that fragmented her daughter’s face. Her daughter scrambled to piece together cheek to cheek, her wide set eyes, her lips open as if she had a secret ready to share.
A tax on her life. What then is my life supposed to mean to me? Chopped liver? Frog’s toes? I’ll make more of my life than she ever could and run away and find someone who will take my picture everyday.
The pieces of mirror jingled inside the recycled liquor store bag. She had left the house before her mother could get creative with the broken shards. She lollygagged for an hour at the hemline of the water and skipped each fragment across the surf, like smooth, flat stones. Except these stones cut her fingertips. She dripped blood onto the sand, glowing with twilight’s haze. She dripped blood onto her clean, white socks.
The streetlight outside her window flickers. She stretches first her right, and then her left leg into the air. Then rocks both back over her head and sinks into her bed as if slipping into the warm ocean current. She notices several delicate, white feathers caught on the windowsill. They tease and bow into the swampy wind rising from the beach.
For the millionth time she writes, where do the seagulls go to sleep? Dear Diary, let me build a nest there too.
She drapes the thin sheet across her face and sticks her head out the window, attempting to squeeze her forehead through the metal bars, installed for her safety. She knocks all those thank you notes across blue carpet.
Two weeks ago. Her nineteenth birthday. She tried to smile her most complicated smile.
Maybe she keeps me on her bedside, maybe she thinks of me every night. Of course, of course. She does not want to share me and she’ll never tell a soul, especially mother. Our secret. She is mine and I am hers. She holds me, frozen in that pose, to her breastbone.
She lay prone against that tree.
Only the photographer discovered she wasn’t wearing underwear that day.
No one can make me. No one can make me. No one can make.
A skinny thing, with breasts like her mother when she was younger. Bug bites. A trim waist and hips that could suit birth if she wants to be fertile. Her laugh will always be fanatical.
Breasts like her mother, but the silent narcissism, that’s from her father. An army brat with too much bicep. The father who returned from the war and then left.
A reminder. She looks at me and sees him. Does anyone ever see the real anything? I promise to always make it up as I go along. I promise to always need to write down what her fingers tasted like.
And this is why her mother banishes her body at night. This is why her mother entertained a crowd with her body’s brief history on the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday.
This is the body that gets smacked over and over again with a stack of bills, when she falls asleep listening to the radio. Past due. Past. Due. “You lazy bitch. Look what you’ve turned me into.”
Her mother calls her a tax on her life. “A tax on my god damn life,” and last week threw a French horn at her. The French horn, purchased on credit, hit her in the stomach and she fell into the full-length mirror, at the end of the hall. She didn’t mind really, never learned to play more than a few sad notes. But she loved the mirror and the mirror broke.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” her mother said to the shards that fragmented her daughter’s face. Her daughter scrambled to piece together cheek to cheek, her wide set eyes, her lips open as if she had a secret ready to share.
A tax on her life. What then is my life supposed to mean to me? Chopped liver? Frog’s toes? I’ll make more of my life than she ever could and run away and find someone who will take my picture everyday.
The pieces of mirror jingled inside the recycled liquor store bag. She had left the house before her mother could get creative with the broken shards. She lollygagged for an hour at the hemline of the water and skipped each fragment across the surf, like smooth, flat stones. Except these stones cut her fingertips. She dripped blood onto the sand, glowing with twilight’s haze. She dripped blood onto her clean, white socks.
The streetlight outside her window flickers. She stretches first her right, and then her left leg into the air. Then rocks both back over her head and sinks into her bed as if slipping into the warm ocean current. She notices several delicate, white feathers caught on the windowsill. They tease and bow into the swampy wind rising from the beach.
For the millionth time she writes, where do the seagulls go to sleep? Dear Diary, let me build a nest there too.
She drapes the thin sheet across her face and sticks her head out the window, attempting to squeeze her forehead through the metal bars, installed for her safety. She knocks all those thank you notes across blue carpet.
Two weeks ago. Her nineteenth birthday. She tried to smile her most complicated smile.
Maybe she keeps me on her bedside, maybe she thinks of me every night. Of course, of course. She does not want to share me and she’ll never tell a soul, especially mother. Our secret. She is mine and I am hers. She holds me, frozen in that pose, to her breastbone.
She lay prone against that tree.
Only the photographer discovered she wasn’t wearing underwear that day.
No one can make me. No one can make me. No one can make.
She always wears white socks with her favorite strappy sandals, even though the other girls circle her on the beach, call her infantile. Through their puckering lips she hears a hiss, she hears infertile and thinks that her mother will be devastated.
Infertile.
Infantile.
Can it be true?
I’m not a baby anymore. I’ll eat any eggs that try to hatch from me. I’ll smash any egg I make or find.
A wave of a secret, sticky with salty grace. Am I in love with the photograph or am I in love with her. Dear Diary, I’ll leave for a moment and touch myself to see. Dear Dr., I do indeed.
The sky turned white and flattened across the party. The sky turned her mother’s voice into a scraping sound and the guests started to leave before she returned from the beach. As she was putting her socks back on, the woman disappeared.
She waved a green coconut, a young one fallen too soon, at the retreating Oldsmobiles, then leaned into a piece of plastic lawn furniture to better hack the fruit open with a steak knife.
She took great, throaty swallows of the milky water inside.
She chewed on the hard meat of it, like exploring someone else’s tongue. Waved away a piece of birthday cake but rubbed the soft wax of a pink birthday candle between two fingers and ran the grease through her matted hair.
Her mother was stacking paper plates, popping cherries from the empty punch bowl. She watched a new woman ease her body into the grass and she could not imagine. Her daughter let each blade tickle her exposed legs, digging her bony ass into the ground to lift the color onto her boring white dress. The party dress her mother bought without asking, with a portion of her college fund. “I’m going to be a writer,” she said once through the door and her mother’s fist nearly broke through.
Enough of that. Not her mother, not now. Her hands explore the many slow ways to make her nipples rise. She shivers. She wants to slow the expansion of her body by digging in the sand. She shrinks to the size of horsefly and closes her three thousand simple eyes.
She is biting the woman incessantly. Along her spine, her coarse armpits, down the crack of her sloping ass. Yes and yes. She tastes the salt of the sea beneath the woman’s skin.
When she opens her eyes again, sweat runs like ant trails across her skin and it is the photograph she is trying to grasp in the dark. Damn it all. I can’t tell if it’s that woman or if it’s me. What happened to her, after the clouds fell? How can she know me so well through a lens? In the notebook, she scribbles questions, leaving space for the answers, hoping to fill them in by her next birthday. If I could only find her address, her name doesn’t matter as much as the place where she sleeps. Does she live along the sea? She must sleep beautifully, so at peace.
As quietly as she is able, she slides out of her nightgown while the shadows of palm leaves swim across the bare wall. Naked, she rises from the steaming mattress, retrieves her stained party dress from the laundry basket, and slowly, with great care, folds it in half, then half again and again. She tucks the dress into an empty shoebox and buries the notebook underneath, wetting the lid with a long, heavy kiss.
Infertile.
Infantile.
Can it be true?
I’m not a baby anymore. I’ll eat any eggs that try to hatch from me. I’ll smash any egg I make or find.
A wave of a secret, sticky with salty grace. Am I in love with the photograph or am I in love with her. Dear Diary, I’ll leave for a moment and touch myself to see. Dear Dr., I do indeed.
The sky turned white and flattened across the party. The sky turned her mother’s voice into a scraping sound and the guests started to leave before she returned from the beach. As she was putting her socks back on, the woman disappeared.
She waved a green coconut, a young one fallen too soon, at the retreating Oldsmobiles, then leaned into a piece of plastic lawn furniture to better hack the fruit open with a steak knife.
She took great, throaty swallows of the milky water inside.
She chewed on the hard meat of it, like exploring someone else’s tongue. Waved away a piece of birthday cake but rubbed the soft wax of a pink birthday candle between two fingers and ran the grease through her matted hair.
Her mother was stacking paper plates, popping cherries from the empty punch bowl. She watched a new woman ease her body into the grass and she could not imagine. Her daughter let each blade tickle her exposed legs, digging her bony ass into the ground to lift the color onto her boring white dress. The party dress her mother bought without asking, with a portion of her college fund. “I’m going to be a writer,” she said once through the door and her mother’s fist nearly broke through.
Enough of that. Not her mother, not now. Her hands explore the many slow ways to make her nipples rise. She shivers. She wants to slow the expansion of her body by digging in the sand. She shrinks to the size of horsefly and closes her three thousand simple eyes.
She is biting the woman incessantly. Along her spine, her coarse armpits, down the crack of her sloping ass. Yes and yes. She tastes the salt of the sea beneath the woman’s skin.
When she opens her eyes again, sweat runs like ant trails across her skin and it is the photograph she is trying to grasp in the dark. Damn it all. I can’t tell if it’s that woman or if it’s me. What happened to her, after the clouds fell? How can she know me so well through a lens? In the notebook, she scribbles questions, leaving space for the answers, hoping to fill them in by her next birthday. If I could only find her address, her name doesn’t matter as much as the place where she sleeps. Does she live along the sea? She must sleep beautifully, so at peace.
As quietly as she is able, she slides out of her nightgown while the shadows of palm leaves swim across the bare wall. Naked, she rises from the steaming mattress, retrieves her stained party dress from the laundry basket, and slowly, with great care, folds it in half, then half again and again. She tucks the dress into an empty shoebox and buries the notebook underneath, wetting the lid with a long, heavy kiss.
Copyright © 2016 Map Literary
Loie Merritt is a writer and mixed media artist from the coast of Maine. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Colorado where she taught creative writing and worked as an editor of Timber Journal. Loie's work has appeared in Lemon Hound, DREGINALD, Anamesa, The Cafe Review, and The Thought Erotic, among others. She lives in Boulder and longs for the sea. More info at www.loiemerritt.com.
